Sini's India

Soft Idly

Idly is a popular steam cooked south indian breakfast made of fermented mix of grounded rice and lentils. Usually soaking & grinding boiled rice take long time and also you may found some difficulty in grinding it in a normal mixer grinder. But this recipe uses cooked boiled rice, so the time required for soaking and grinding would be less compared to normal idly recipes and also you get very soft idly. So try it out and enjoy!

Ingredients

Dosa Rice : 4 cups

Cooked Boiled Rice: 2 cups

Urad Dal : 1cup

Salt : 1 teaspoon

Water : 5 cups

Preparation

Step 1:
Wash and soak dosa rice and urad dal in separate bowls in plenty of water for 3-4 hours.

Step 2:
Drain out the soaking water from both bowls. Grind soaked dosa rice along with cooked rice and portion of water in a wet grinder (or mixer grinder) to a nice mix and pour into one big bowl. Then grind urad dal & water and pour into the rice mix. Fine grinding is required for urad dal as well. Mix well and keep it overnight for fermentation. Do not forget to use a big bowl to keep this, else the mix might overflow due to fermentation.

Step 3:
Next day morning add salt into the batter and mix well. Grease idly mould with a bit of cooking oil and pour into each one.

Step 4:
Pour water into idly vessel or in a pressure cooker and keep the filled idly mould into it. Wait for the steam and once you see the steam coming out wait for 10 minutes and switch off the flame/heat.

Step 5:
After 10-12 minutes open the pressure cooker/idly vessel and take out the mould. Spray little water on the idlies which help them to be little more soft and can come out from the mould easily. Take out the idly from mould once it is warm or becomes normal.

5 Comments

It’s raw rice. In most super markets and rice shops you’ll get it marked as Dosa rice. It’s usually of lower price compared to rice used for preparing steamed rice, and gives softer dosa/idly compared to regular raw rice.

Just want to let you know that I got fluffy and moist idlies by following your recipe. I don’t get dosa rice here in U.S, so I replaced it with basmati. Have had not so good experience making idly with sona masoori rice in the past.

I love cooking and trying out various recipes, and also to come up with ways to achieve good results in reasonable time and effort 🙂 All of the recipes I post here were tried out by me at least 2-3 times (if not a few dozen times) before I was happy with a simple method which gives me good results. Hope you enjoy making these dishes. Would be thrilled if you let me know in the comments how your experiment went.
If you have recipe requests for any Malabar dishes, please contact me and I’ll make every effort to get the recipe, try it out and post it here.